Leonard Hobhouse as a social theorist

Life and work

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse – known informally to his friends and family as ‘Leo’ – was born into a prosperous Cornish land-owning family in 1864. His father was an Anglican clergyman and provided him with the private education at an English public school normal for a member of the country gentry. Hobhouse nevertheless rejected both his father’s religion and his Toryism, following the more radical leanings of his wider family. ² In 1883, he gained a scholarship to Oxford, where he became involved in Labour politics and the work of Canon Barnett’s East End settlement at Toynbee Hall. After 14 years at Oxford, he sought a more supportive environment for his political interests and took up an offer to write leading articles for the Manchester Guardian. There he wrote many critical articles on British imperial policy in South Africa, his views having been strongly influenced by his elder sister Emily’s vociferous criticisms of the British repression of the Boer population and the use of concentration camps (Hall, 2008).

Concurrently with this work for the Guardian and, after 1902, Tribune, Hobhouse undertook some part-time teaching in politics at the newly established London School of Economics (LSE). ³ When, at the behest of Victor Branford, the Scottish businessman and prominent Liberal Martin White offered to finance two lectureships in sociology at the LSE, Hobhouse was appointed to one of these and began lecturing on ‘Comparative Ethics’. White was subsequently persuaded to convert the lectureships into chairs and Hobhouse was appointed to the Martin White Professorship in Sociology in 1907. He remained at the School for the rest of his life, overseeing its role as the principal base for sociological work in Britain. This influence persisted for many years after his death in 1929, thanks largely to the efforts of Morris Ginsberg, his associate, disciple and successor, who indefatigably – and somewhat relentlessly – promoted Hobhouse’s ideas until his own retirement in 1954. ⁴

As an undergraduate, Hobhouse had conceived the idea of writing a comprehensive account of progress as the growth of rationality and collectivism and this aspiration provided a framework for the development of his work in politics, philosophy and sociology. His first publication was The Labour Movement (1893), which was strongly influenced by Fabian ideas on trade unions, cooperatives and municipal organisations. This was followed by The Theory of Knowledge (1896), which developed a critical account of the idealist philosophy of his Oxford contemporaries. Through his involvement with the LSE he began to write in psychology and what he now began to call ‘sociology’, publishing this in the companion volumes on Mind in Evolution (1901) and Morals in Evolution (1906). These accounts of mentality and culture were the basis for his later work in The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918) and Social Development (1924), in which he set out a general social theory and which he saw as the key volumes in his evolving ‘Principles of Sociology’. Among a plethora of other books and papers, he oversaw a comparative study of social institutions (Hobhouse et al., [1914] 1965), produced a summation of his philosophical ideas (Hobhouse, 1913) and set out a definitive statement of liberal principles (Hobhouse, [1911] 1994). ⁵ A full list of his book publications is given in Figure 1.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Principal works of Leonard Hobhouse.

Knowing the social world

Hobhouse’s philosophical interests were in the philosophy of mind and knowledge, topics on which he produced a lengthy text (Hobhouse, 1896) that even one of his most enthusiastic commentators described as ‘unbelievably dull’ (Carter, 1927: 9). However, this judgement – which could be applied to a great many academic books – should not lead to its neglect. Through a critique of the idealism of his close friend Francis Bradley (1893) and his associate Bernard Bosanquet (1885), Hobhouse pioneered a form of ‘realism’ that was later developed by Alfred Whitehead (1927, 1929). Indeed, this approach to knowledge has striking similarities with the ‘analytical realism’ that Talcott Parsons (1937) was to develop from the work of Whitehead and also with the much later ‘critical realism’ of Roy Bhaskar (1975, 1979). Hobhouse’s realist view of science was the basis on which he grounded his theoretical and empirical work in sociology.

He rejected the idealist doctrine that the objects of experience are constructed by the mind wholly from appearances or ideas but did not simply replace this with a naïve empiricist view of the direct and immediate mental representation of material objects. His view was that while experience is indeed dependent on what is given to it, independently of thought, the mind is also active in constructing and shaping the contents of experience. Knowledge must be seen as dependent on both thought and sensation, on ideas and experience: ‘Any ordinary judgement … is empirical as drawn from experience, but it is drawn from it by one or other of our modes of thought’ (Hobhouse, 1896: 592). It is through this reciprocal relationship that it is possible to acquire objective knowledge of an external world:

The understanding makes knowledge, but it does not make nature. Memory, construction, inference contribute, not to the nature of the given, not to make the given what it is, but merely to the judgments which we form about the given or about facts that we suppose to resemble it.

Hobhouse thus recognised that it is never possible to know the external reality as it is independently of an observer, as knowledge is limited by the particular spatio-temporal standpoint of the observer, by available concepts and understandings and by the constitution of the human sensory apparatus. The external world can be experienced only from a particular standpoint and through those things to which the human senses are responsive. Reality is infinite, and its ‘extended range of sentience’ is inaccessible to human observers, who can know nothing of its extent, its boundaries or its ultimate character. These inaccessible aspects of reality – referred to by Spencer ([1862] 1910) as ‘the unknowable’ – can be guessed at or hypothesised, but they can never be known with the certainty of direct experiential knowledge. Knowledge of reality can, however, be improved by increasing the range of our sensory experience through, for example, building improved instruments of observation that are able to provide us with experiences that are unavailable to the unaided senses. Even with these improved instruments of observation, we can never be certain that we have had access to reality in its fullest extent as a residual unknown will always remain. The partial conceptions of reality produced by science never exhaust ‘the whole nature of the existence with which it has to deal’ (Hobhouse, 1896: 597).

Conceptualisations of reality depend, therefore, on a framework of existing concepts and understandings. In the case of science, knowledge that goes beyond the direct evidence of the senses is attained through building on the existing scientific judgements that have been established in a particular field and that comprise a theoretical matrix that makes possible a growth in knowledge. Hobhouse’s position is similar to that developed later, in various ways, by Thomas Kuhn ([1962] 1970), Stephen Toulmin (1972) and Mary Hesse (1974). Scientific work, he argued, builds up a ‘network of judgements’, and the validity of any particular theoretical proposition depends on both its logical relation to the existing network of accepted judgements and the support offered by empirical evidence. Scientific truth emerges, then, from a ‘consilience’ among the separate judgements made by scientists. New propositions are shaped by existing theoretical interpretations, which may, in turn, need to be reformulated to produce a new and more coherent synthesis. It is by organising the results of observation within an established body of scientific propositions that scientists can synthesise sense data into a system of knowledge that gives them greater confidence in its factual status. Such a body of scientific theory can suggest further avenues of enquiry, and these may, in turn, lead to a reformulation of the synthesis. The resulting body of knowledge, always subject to a constant renewing synthesis, ‘is not the world of thought merely, but a system of thought truly representing a real world’ (Hobhouse, 1896: 595). While concluding that this partial knowledge ‘may be but a footprint of the Eternal’, he adds that ‘Every advance in knowledge is a step towards a better understanding of the nature of the whole’ (Hobhouse, 1896: 606).

Hobhouse saw this view of knowledge as applicable to natural science and social science alike. A scientific sociology can grasp social reality through reformulating existing theoretical ideas on the basis of improved empirical knowledge. In joining the new Sociological Society, Hobhouse hoped to engage with its diversity of theoretical views and to find a means through which he could convince others that his was the way forward. The Sociological Society had been formed in 1903 by followers of Patrick Geddes to bring together all of those interested in the development of sociology (Scott and Bromley, 2013; Scott and Husbands, 2007). To give the Society credibility as an umbrella organisation that was not simply a mouthpiece for Geddes, Victor Branford – its chief mover – asked Hobhouse to take on the editorship of its new journal the Sociological Review. Hobhouse agreed and took on the delicate task of balancing the diverse views of Society members through an intellectual prospectus for its work. He set out this prospectus in his editorial for the first issue of the Sociological Review (Hobhouse, 1908). While it was ultimately unsuccessful in holding the Society together, it remains an important statement of Hobhouse’s view of the aims and tasks that he saw for a scientific sociology.

Hobhouse first distinguished ‘Scientific Sociology’ properly from the closely related tasks of ‘Moral Philosophy’. Each discipline was, however, a part of the broader intellectual enterprise that he termed simply ‘Sociology’ or ‘Social Philosophy’. Scientific sociology is concerned with describing and explaining the facts of social life and with exploring the question of what is the case in any particular society. Moral philosophy, on the other hand, is concerned with the values followed in practical social activities and hence with what ought to be the case. In making this distinction, Hobhouse was demarcating the separate spheres of facts and values, of is and ought.

Both disciplines also had an important part to play in a third sphere of activity, which he called ‘Applied Social Ethics’. This is the directly practical part of sociology, involving the formulation and implementation of social policies and practical reforms. It draws on moral philosophy for its guiding principles and on scientific sociology for its knowledge of the current state of society and the likely consequences of its policy proposals. The distinction that Hobhouse drew between scientific sociology and applied social ethics helped to crystallise an institutional and departmental separation between sociology, on one hand, and both social work and the study of social administration, on the other. In the LSE and, later, in many other universities, this separation was to be marked by the establishment of separate departments or sections concerned with ‘Social Policy’ or ‘Social Administration’ and with social work training.

Hobhouse next turned his attention to the division of labour within scientific sociology itself, distinguishing the numerous ‘special sociologies’ from a ‘general sociology’. Sociological specialisms might be descriptive, analytical or comparative to varying degrees and are differentiated by their subject matters as, for example, sociologies of the family, class, law and religion. The work of these special sociologies, Hobhouse argued, had to be integrated through the work of those involved in general sociology, an activity that placed at the core of the discipline the synthesising and unifying of the results of the specialisms. General sociology has the task of investigating the ways in which whole societies are organised and how the differentiated ‘parts’ studied by the special sociologies fit together into a more or less coherent whole. General sociology, therefore, does not have a separate subject matter from the special sociologies but is ‘a vitalising principle’ that runs through them all. It is the theoretical synthesis of their various scientific judgements and helps to orient their empirical work. ⁶ General sociology understands the social world as consisting of social relations that are indefinite in number and extend as an ‘amorphous tissue’ without boundaries, within which relatively defined and durable sets of relations can be identified as ‘societies’ and their constituent social structures, such as the families, factories, churches, voluntary associations, classes and nations studied by special sociologies (Hobhouse, [1924] 1966: 39). Both general sociology and the special sociologies must work alongside a ‘Social Psychology’ that uncovers the mental processes involved in the social activities and social relations studied by sociologists.

Having produced what he now saw as a special sociology of moral institutions (Hobhouse, 1906), Hobhouse concentrated his subsequent sociological work on general sociology and social psychology and their implications for moral philosophy. His work can be seen as a development from the social philosophy of his former Oxford colleagues such as Henry Jones ([1883] 1997) and Bernard Bosanquet (1899). It was towards a sociology that combined ‘scientific sociology’ with an ethical philosophy that could inform programmes of social reform aimed at establishing social justice. This approach was intended to ensure that scientific sociology contributes to ‘social progress’. The general sociology and social psychology that Hobhouse placed at the heart of his sociological reflections have, however, been all but invisible in discussions of Hobhouse’s work. It is the purpose of this article to uncover and explore these theoretical underpinnings.

Evolutionary foundations

Hobhouse’s first works, which led to his appointment at the LSE, were not originally envisaged as contributions to the development of sociology as a scientific discipline within the academic establishment. Mind in Evolution (1901) and Morals in Evolution (1906) were seen, rather, as provisional explorations into the mental and ethical evolution of human beings. Only after his appointment as a professor on sociology did he begin, more self-consciously, to construct the general social theory that he felt was needed in order to carry forward his project of explaining social evolution.

Mind in Evolution presented an evolutionary account of human consciousness and intelligence, drawing on animal biology and experimental psychology to uncover the origins of the purposive, intentional features of human mentality in the forms of behaviour and mentality found in other animals and to show its implications for social action. ⁷ His argument was that non-human species rely largely on fixed instincts that have led to rudimentary forms of social life and some limited cooperation (Hobhouse, 1913: 171). While some aspects of kinship relations among humans may also have arisen in this way (Hobhouse, [1924] 1966: 40), Hobhouse held that most forms of human social activity depend on the capacity for intelligent thought and the possibilities this gives for purposive action and systematic learning. His evolutionary psychology – 80 years before its re-emergence in crudely deterministic forms – showed that the specifically intelligent mental faculties of contemporary humans had evolved from primate and early hominid mentalities and dismissed the idea that there is anything unique in the human capacity for intelligence. What distinguishes humans from other animals is simply the extent to which intelligence and purpose have been developed and, therefore, the capacity that they have for conscious control over their behaviour. The human ability to channel instincts and drives increases along with the growth of consciousness and intelligence (Hobhouse, 1901: 100) and allows humans to exercise a far greater control over their social relations. Thus, ‘in the basis of the individual constitution lie tendencies, modes of feeling, promptings of action’ and so forth that evolved because they contributed to the survival of human populations (Hobhouse, 1913: 37). ⁸

While there has been no discernible biological evolution in human mental structures since the emergence of Homo sapiens, Hobhouse recognised that the capacity for intelligent and purposive thought and communication allows acquired characteristics to be passed on from one generation to another as the learned traits that comprise a cultural inheritance. The behaviour of the human individual, then,

is modified by the social atmosphere in which he [Sic.] grows up. It takes its particular shape from the traditions of his society, his class, his school, his family. It … is merged in that moral organism of many inter-acting parts which is called the self.

In developing his account of human action, his Mind in Evolution made a major contribution to the social psychology that flowered in the works of McDougall (1908) and Wallas (1908) and on which he himself was later to draw. Having completed his initial account, however, he turned to an exploration of cultural inheritance in Morals in Evolution.

The capacity for intelligent thought allows human beings to consciously construct forms of social life and to do so through the invention and following of rules. These rules reduce uncertainty and so provide a basis for predictability by allowing those who encounter each other to build up social expectations: ‘If men are to live together at all they must know what they may expect and what is expected of them under given conditions’ (Hobhouse, 1906: 31, vol. 1, [1924] 1966: 41). In rejecting the purely rational pursuit of self-interest as a sufficient basis for social order, Hobhouse’s view that rules and expectations are central to social life is an implicit echo of Durkheim’s ([1893] 1984) emphasis on the ‘non-contractual element in contract’. Hobhouse saw rules and expectations as formed into clusters with a customary or legal character, which he does not yet consistently describe as ‘institutions’, and he draws on a range of ethnographic sources to present a comparative account of institutions of law and justice, property and marriage, and the less formal sets of rules underpinning class relations, local community and the subordination of women. The use of this comparative evidence allowed him to depict various forms of social organisation on an evolutionary scale.

It was only after completing these early works and securing his chair at the LSE that Hobhouse pursued the task that he set out in the Sociological Review of constructing a general sociology and social psychology that could be used to deepen his account of social evolution and so strengthen the practical and political conclusions that he drew from it. Although he was aware of the sociological discussions going on in other countries, the sources on which he drew for his own sociological work are few in number. He drew, of course, on the idea of the social organism that had been fostered by Comte and Spencer and that influenced the work of his friend John Hobson ([1902] 1996), but his publications show only a limited engagement with other sociological work. His friend Bosanquet was an admirer of Durkheim and Hobhouse may have acquired some familiarity with Durkheim’s sociology from him, but he was to become very critical of what he saw as the corporatist approach taken by Durkheim. The only other French sociologist that he admitted some familiarity with was the ethnographer Letourneau. Among German sociologists, he seems to have had some awareness of Simmel, but knew only of Müller-Lyer’s work on cultural evolution in any detail. His main influences were undoubtedly British. He noted the importance of the US sociologists Giddings, Ward, Small and Ross, and in the 1924 Preface to Social Development, he noted the particular influence of his LSE colleagues Edward Urwick, Graham Wallas, Morris Ginsberg and Bronisław Malinowski and he reported his reliance on the writings of William McDougall and Robert MacIver. ¹⁰ It seems likely that MacIver was a principal source, both in person and in his writing, and MacIver was closely familiar with the works of Tönnies, Simmel and Durkheim.

In the remainder of this article, I turn to the task of uncovering the general sociology and social psychology that Hobhouse began to construct after 1907. In the next section, I set out the model of social structure, and in the final section, I outline the social psychology that underpinned this.

General sociology: Social solidarity and system integration

Hobhouse set out his model of social structure somewhat reluctantly, seeing the theoretical work as a necessary preliminary to his evolutionary and ethical concerns. Its elements were first outlined in lectures at Columbia University, published in Social Evolution and Political Theory (1911), pursued further in an Encyclopaedia article that he began in 1916 (1920), and were given their clearest expression in Social Development (1924), the culminating volume of his ‘Principles of Sociology’. Some of his arguments may today appear as somewhat commonplace, but this is because they became the basis of a core tradition of mainstream sociology in Britain that persisted until its recasting by newer theoretical approaches from the 1960s (Scott, 2014). By this time they were no longer recognised as having been produced by Hobhouse. They had become a taken-for-granted part of the framework of social theory that was being challenged by newer perspectives from France, Germany and the United States. In Hobhouse’s own time, however, his ideas were the only significant statement of sociological theory to make a major contribution to sociological debate in Britain.

According to Hobhouse, the fundamental social phenomena produced by and manifested in social actions are social relations, of which he identified two types. First, there are relations of association or interaction among individuals that arise from casual and informal interactions and from encounters between those holding varying social positions. Such relations vary greatly in their substantive content – they are concerned with production, religion, politics and so on – and may be either antagonistic or cooperative, or a mixture of the two. Second, there are relations of dependence that result from the ways in which the actions of different individuals and their interactions with others are conditioned by or contingent upon those of others, regardless of whether the participants are aware of this dependence. Social relations of both types tend to become clustered into relatively distinct groupings that Hobhouse called ‘societies’. A society, then, is any plurality of human beings connected by ‘durable and defined’ relations. As a cluster of densely connected social relations, a society constitutes a bounded social system of action. It is not, however, a tightly closed circle of interaction as the social relations of participants ramify out into a larger tissue or network of social relations (Hobhouse, [1924] 1966: 40).

Members of societies share sets of dispositions to act in particular ways and this gives them a capacity for collective action and the possibility of a common will. A society that persists for any time and that has the capacity to act in an orderly way will have done so only because its members have established and maintained common rules of behaviour that ensure ‘a definite understanding on the part of each man of what he may do in relation to others and of what they may do to him’ (Hobhouse, [1924] 1966: 41). On this basis, Hobhouse ([1920] 1966) held that a society is

a definite collection of people united by certain special relations with one another and in some way marked off by these relations from others who do not enter into them. A society, then, has a unity, a structure, and a life of its own.

Hobhouse recognised three principal types of society: ‘kindreds’ based on sexual and parental relations, ‘communities’ based on a commonality of sentiments and way of life and ‘associations’ united in the performance of a particular specialised activity. ¹¹ Kindreds and communities are rooted in shared sentiments and solidarities, while associations rely on organs of control over their members and may also act as organs of control over other social groupings. Examples of communities are villages or nations, while examples of associations include business enterprises, schools, churches or universities. Each of these groupings is a ‘society’, and as elements in wider networks of social relations, they may form parts of larger societies.

Communities exist where there is ‘a common rule habitually observed throughout a population of distinct structure with assignable limits’ (Hobhouse, [1920] 1966: 42). Common rules comprise the ‘working code’ that governs the social actions of members (Hobhouse, [1920] 1966: 206) and are typically unconsciously established as customs that regulate habitual dispositions. Those who act in customary ways do not ask themselves why they should act in these ways but accept the rule uncritically. By acting from habit they produce a high level of conformity within their community. Associations, on the other hand, have no basis in sentiment and depend upon consciously established rules that are enacted as laws ‘declared and enforced by a constituted authority’ or organ of control (Hobhouse, [1920] 1966: 47). Laws must be deliberately enforced through rational, reflexive actions involving punishment or the threat of punishment. Associations are formal organisations of action governed through authority.

The actions of individuals, kindreds, communities and associations are regulated by rules (whether customs or laws), and Hobhouse ascribed particular importance to those rules that are clustered into social institutions that regulate behaviour in a specific sphere of activity. Institutions are systems of rules and associated sanctions that are ‘part of the established and recognised apparatus of social life regulating a whole mass of human relations’ and are thereby the crucial elements in the social structure of a large-scale society (Hobhouse, [1920] 1966: 49; see also Ginsberg, 1950: 59). Hobhouse cited marriage, monogamy, baptism, representative government, property, the law, the church, the university and the family as examples of social institutions. The distinction between institutions and the associations that they regulate is apparent in his reference to ‘the’ church as an institution and ‘a’ church as an association.

The larger societies in which communities and associations are embedded are typically territorially contained populations – such as localities, regions and nations – whose boundaries tend to divide them from other territorial societies. Hobhouse saw these as forming ‘national’ societies whenever those who live within the territory share a sense of common nationhood as a national ‘community’. In a national society, the ‘connective relations’ of a community may be largely contained within its borders, although those of the associations may extend across its boundaries as ‘international’ relations (Hobhouse, [1920] 1966: 39; see also Ginsberg, 1921: 120, 127).

Hobhouse illustrated this through considering British national society. This, he argued,

has, indeed, a collective life and character. The British nation is a unity with a life of its own. But the unity is constituted by certain ties that bind together all British subjects, which ties are in the last resort feelings and ideas, sentiments of patriotism, of kinship, a common pride, and a thousand more subtle sentiments that bind together men who speak a common language, have behind them a common history, and understand one another as they can understand no one else.

In such a large-scale national society, the differentiation of activities will result in the formation of large numbers of specialised associations that are linked only loosely to the communal base. It is unlikely, however, that specialised associations can be completely detached. No matter how specialised they may be, there are always likely to be some parts of their activities that remain within the more diffuse communal structure. For example, some aspects of religious belief and action may not be organised into churches, some educational activities may take place outside schools and universities and much political action may not be incorporated within states. Hobhouse held that in modern societies dominated by large-scale national and international associations, communal solidarity has been largely confined to relatively small-scale localities that persist only as fragments of the primordial community but provide a more immediate sense of belonging for those who live within them than can be achieved through sentiments of nationality or patriotism.

The central associations in such modern national societies are states: associations with an authoritative jurisdiction over all who live within a specific territory (see also MacIver, 1917: 28). Where a sense of national community is weak, state authority will lack sufficient grounding in the communal solidarity of its members and it may become a merely coercive agency reliant on formal sanctions to enforce its laws. When a state relies mainly on coercion, many members of the society may see social order as imposed rather than as expressing the consensual will of a community (Hobhouse, [1924] 1966: 41, 50–53). It is especially likely, Hobhouse argued, that social order will be maintained through the coercive power of a state in any society with distinct and conflicting social classes and other forms of social division.

Hobhouse saw the development of territorial societies as depending on a number of factors. First, they are shaped by the external facts of nature. The physical environment and the biological properties of the human body set inescapable conditions to which any form of social life must adapt. There is considerable scope for variation within the limits inherent in the conditions of nature, but these natural limits operate as ultimate constraints on human possibilities. A society must change – or make feasible modifications to nature – if it is to persist in the face of natural threats or if it is to take advantage of the opportunities made possible by its natural resources or physical conditions. Second, social activities are shaped by the psychological properties of the human mind. Forms of social life and adaptive responses to the environment are produced through variations in the consciousness and intelligence of human beings. People may plan and choose rationally and deliberately how they will change their way of life, or they may continue to act habitually and so to reproduce an existing social pattern. Third, and particularly important, social activities are shaped by the patterns of rules, sentiments, purposes and interests to which people are exposed in their social relations (Hobhouse, 1911: 98). These ‘internal’ conditions relate particularly to the integration and consistency of the rules established within a society.

Territorial societies are structurally coherent and stable if they are integrated at two distinct levels. There is first social integration through relations of cooperation and conflict, or consensus and coercion, among their individuals and constituent societies. Cooperative or consensual societies will tend to have a high degree of coherence and stability, while conflictual or coercive societies will tend towards instability. Second, there are relations of what can be called system integration. These are relations of compatibility and contradiction among the institutions that regulate individuals and societies. ¹² Institutional compatibility is a condition for high structural coherence, while institutional clashes and incompatibilities generate instability. The state of system integration is an especially important condition for structural coherence and stability, as a high degree of institutional compatibility tends to facilitate cooperation and consensus in individual and associational activities. Institutional contradictions, on the other hand, pull people in opposite directions, giving rise to conflicting impulses to action and consequent instability. In complex territorial societies where there is a high degree of differentiation in social activities, institutional compatibility depends upon the extent to which there is a complementarity among the various activities carried out by its members and so a consequent ‘organic’ character for the society as a whole (Hobhouse, [1920] 1966: 47, [1924] 1966: 66). ¹³ Structural coherence in such a society takes the form that Durkheim ([1893] 1984) had described as organic solidarity. An enduring society, then, is

a system with a distinctive character and mode of action of its own constituted by the conjoint action of parts, each in turn with a distinct character and mode of action of its own, but conditioned in the maintenance of their character and the pursuit of their activity by their mutual requirements as members of the union.

Organic system coherence is not a necessary state for all territorial societies. It is simply that if societies are to persist for any time, then certain conditions must be met. Not all societies will actually succeed in meeting these conditions and so will break down. The conditions are likely to be met only if practices that help survival are perpetuated through a process of natural selection through adaptation. Societies that fail to evolve or to nurture these practices will break down. Achievement of a degree of organic stability establishes an in-built inertia that helps to contain tendencies to dislocation and breakdown (Hobhouse, 1913: 178).

Adaptation of territorial societies to their environmental, psychological and institutional conditions occurs through the purposive social actions of individuals and associations. Societies are the results of purposive actions aimed at the pursuit of interests and the satisfaction of needs, but they are rarely deliberate or planned creations. Rather, societies and their institutions are

trial and error experiments which grow up in a groping way as the results of the efforts of individual social beings to form a modus vivendi and which receive social sanction when found more or less to meet the needs of life.

The institutional structure of a society and its development over time are the result of a blind, unplanned process, as the unintended consequence of purposive actions (Hobhouse, [1924] 1966; and see Giddens, [1976] 1977; Merton, 1936; Smith, [1766] 1910):

The life of society is not the product of coherent thinking by a single mind. On the contrary, many customs and institutions, which make up social life, have grown up in a detached, sporadic, unconscious, often unreasonable fashion, and even the more conscious and deliberate ones are rather efforts to correct some particular anomaly, than clearsighted applications of a governing principle to social life as a whole.

Social psychology: Mind, self and society

In his general sociology, Hobhouse set out a conceptualisation of social structure and the forms of action through which it is produced and reproduced. He recognised, however, that it was also necessary to provide an ontology of the social. Rules, institutions and societies have no tangible material existence separate from the individuals who follow and participate in them, and he recognised the need to show why these social facts can be used as legitimate elements in sociological explanations. It is not good enough simply to treat them as useful fictions; they must be shown to have a non-material yet real existence. This was to be provided by his social psychology.

All social phenomena are held in the minds of individuals and so have a psychological character, but in order to operate as social realities they must be seen as comprising a ‘social mentality’, a system of ideas and sentiments held in common by the members of a society and that is the basis of all talk of ‘the common will, the public mind, the collective purpose’ (Hobhouse, [1924] 1966: 178). Hobhouse can be seen as addressing precisely the same issues considered by Durkheim ([1895] 1982) in his discussion of the reality sui generis of ‘social facts’. Durkheim postulated a conscience collective that has many similarities with Hobhouse’s social mentality, yet there is no indication that Hobhouse followed Durkheim’s account. Indeed, Ginsberg’s summary of Hobhouse’s position sought to distinguish it very sharply from that of Durkheim.

Hobhouse ([1924] 1966) distinguished his view of social mentality from that of Bosanquet and the Oxford idealists, who presented the ‘general will’ of a group as something much closer to a collective, corporate mind (p. 181). In his earlier work, Hobhouse had, in fact, written of a ‘social mind’, but he abandoned this term in favour of ‘social mentality’ because of the misinterpretations that surrounded the success of McDougall’s ([1920] 1939) book on the ‘group mind’. Ginsberg took this much further. Attributing the idea of a ‘group mind’ to Durkheim, he warned the young Talcott Parsons during his visit to the LSE in 1924–1925 of the need to avoid this dangerous idea (Parsons, [1970] 1977). Ginsberg ([1954] 1956) argued that societies are not minds, but they are ‘mind-created and mind sustained’:

Minds in relation to each other do not constitute a mind in the sense in which each individual has a mind. Societies have a mental organization but they are not minds. They are relational complexes of a peculiar kind, with characteristics of their own.

However, the difference between Hobhouse and McDougall or Durkheim was not great. Although McDougall used the term ‘group mind’, he did so quite deliberately and on the basis of a particular view of the individual mind. McDougall held that individual minds were not unitary and substantial souls but were dispersed mental systems. In exactly the same way, he argued, the group mind exists only as a dispersed system contained in communicating individual minds (McDougall, [1920] 1939: 12). This was the view taken also by Hobhouse, whose account thereby went beyond that of Durkheim to the interpersonal processes that constitute the social mentality and underpin social structures.

Hobhouse followed Spencer (1873–1893) in seeing language as central to the constitution of social reality. A linguistic capacity emerged along with the evolution of human mental capacities and this made possible an immense flowering of mentality and of social life: ‘From the dawn of language onwards the action of mind on mind is the leading factor in development, and henceforward every phase of thought may be regarded as a social product and as a cause of further social effects’ (Hobhouse, 1913: 90).

It is through this linguistically constituted communication that individuals encounter a framework of ideas, judgements and modes of action. This language shapes the most fundamental elements of consciousness:

our ideas from a very early stage clothe themselves in language, and language is a social product. Now our ideas may be suggested in the first instance by personal experience … None the less, the form which they take is largely determined by the means of expression which enable us to fix, utilize, and build with one while another remains a vague suggestion, of which perhaps we finally lose hold.

Thus, ‘from infancy upwards the social milieu into which he is born interpenetrates his thought and will, and turns his individuality into a creation of the time and place of his life’ (Hobhouse, 1911: 94).

A social mentality is, therefore, a flow of linguistically formed thought. As ‘the sum of thought in existence at any time’ it has no substantial existence apart from the thought of each of the individuals whose thought it shapes: ‘there is no thought except in the mind of an individual thinker, yet the thought … of each individual … is a social product’ (Hobhouse, 1911: 94). ¹⁴ This argument rests on the idea that social life is produced by and comprises discursive acts through which individuals convey meanings and sentiments. Interaction and relational systems comprise a ‘mental network or reticulum’ within which meanings and sentiments are communicated from one individual to another as a distinct flow of thought – ‘social thought’ – that ‘taken together constitute not a mind but a mental condition widely dominating thought and action’ (Hobhouse, [1924] 1966: 185).

This flow of meanings and sentiments from one mind to another over successive generations grows as a social inheritance that is ‘the work of many hands’ (Hobhouse, [1924] 1966: 185). This is the origin of the shared rules of behaviour that comprise social institutions. Shared rules result from ‘the interaction between mind and mind and the shaping of individual opinions into a social standard’ (Hobhouse, 1906: 16, vol. 1). Ideas, beliefs, rules and imaginative creations thereby comprise a ‘living tradition’ or, more generally, a diverse ‘system of many traditions’ (Hobhouse, [1924] 1966: 212–213), although the individuals who contribute to it may be aware of only a very small part (Ginsberg, [1929] 1947: 53). This social inheritance is ‘maintained from generation to generation by oral or written tradition’ (Hobhouse, 1901: 345), and although ideas may be temporarily stored in books and other material repositories, they must always re-enter minds, through reading, if they are to become active psychological influences on individuals.

A social mentality is, then, a system of individual minds in communication that forms the ‘social milieu’ into which individuals are born and through which they become social beings, ‘shaping the ideas and practices of each new generation that grows up under its shadow’ (Hobhouse, 1913: 12):

This mentality is conditioned not only by the nature of the constituent minds as they would be apart from the group relations – e.g., as they may actually function in other groups – but also by the relations constituting the group, and through these often enough by situations in which the group happens to find itself.

This social inheritance is the ‘mass of ideas operative in a society, communicable from man to man, serving to direct the thoughts and actions of individuals’ through ‘a tissue of operative psychological forces’ (Hobhouse, 1911: 98) and as an internalised element in individual minds must be seen as ‘operating in the main indirectly and unconsciously, but omnipresent’ (Hobhouse, [1924] 1966: 187). Ginsberg ([1929] 1947) summarised this as the view that society exists only as ‘a sum of habits, dispositions, ideas effective in a group of interacting minds’ (p. 53).

It is through living within a network of communication that the individual members of a society arrive at a self-concept and build concepts of the other selves existing in their world and representations of the collective phenomena in which they and others are involved. A conception of self is built up as people relate their experiences to their evolving sense of their permanent and persistent identity, and they come to understand the identities taken by others as they encounter them in their social interactions (Hobhouse, 1901: 339). Through this emerging awareness of a shared selfhood, people come to understand that the predictable, recurrent ways in which they and others act are the outcome of their following shared rules of behaviour. Through being communicated, an individual’s judgements on the behaviour of others enter into circulation among those living in the same society. Discussion among these individuals may result in modified judgements that re-enter the circulation of ideas, and eventually, a consensus may be formed that is a basis for mutual understanding. ¹⁵

The common tendencies of thought and mutual understanding may comprise a ‘common character’ for the members of a society. For example, a general and distinctive character may emerge among the members of a school, a village, a class or a nation. Such a common character may be the basis of general trends of thought that comprise a common will or form a specific public opinion. Such a common will is the basis for collective action by members of a society.

Hobhouse did not assume that a social mentality must always express a harmonious consensus. Where the members of a society are involved in diverse and differentiated social relations, the social mentality will be correspondingly diverse and pluralistic, with a limited overall commonality pertaining to cross-societal relations. Its diverse traditions – ‘subcultures’ in later terminology – may tend towards the formation of ‘sectional wills’ that preclude unitary action by the society as a whole. Indeed, social conflicts will obstruct and prevent the formation of a common will (Hobhouse, [1924] 1966: 201) and, as I have shown, may result in social instability.

Conclusion

I have shown that Hobhouse’s neglected and forgotten social theory provides a sophisticated framework of ideas that resonate with many contemporary debates. These ideas place him firmly within the mainstream of classical sociology, as someone aware of the development of sociology in other countries and as someone who might have made – indeed, ought to have made – significant contributions to international discussions. However, the insularity of British sociologists limited this engagement and has meant that his intellectual importance has been continually underestimated.

Hobhouse was every bit as clear as Durkheim that social life comprises a reality sui generis and that the social mentality – Durkheim’s conscience collective – is a social fact. There is little in The Rules of Sociological Method that he would disavow, although the widely held view in Britain during the 1920s that Durkheim was a theorist of dangerous corporatist ideas meant that there was little intellectual engagement with him. ¹⁶ Hobhouse never directly engaged with Durkheim’s work, yet he came to many similar conclusions. However, his work elucidated much that Durkheim had left implicit. Hobhouse showed that the social mentality comprises a flow of communicated thoughts among a network of related individuals, and he showed how socialisation and social influence shape individual consciousness and individual motivation. In doing so, he elucidated the ‘operative psychological forces’ involved in the phenomena that Durkheim had described in such terms as ‘collective currents’ but had not himself explained.

Hobhouse’s account of the social formation of the self – which clearly owes something to William James – was not carried as far as it was by Mead ([1927] 1934), but it did provide a way of connecting Durkheimian arguments with those of symbolic interactionism. Hobhouse’s work in this area, especially his discussion of the formation of public opinion and collective will, echoes ideas raised by Cooley in his account of opinion formation and the ‘larger mind’ (Cooley, 1909).

These arguments in ‘social psychology’ were linked by Hobhouse to a strongly relational sociology of the kind discussed contemporaneously by Simmel ([1908] 1968) and Tönnies ([1889] 1955) and recently by Emirbayer (1997) and Crossley (2010). Like these writers, Hobhouse would not remain content with a microsociology of social relations but articulated a macrosociology of systemically structured social relations and their grounding in social institutions and mechanisms of social control.

This social theory was underpinned by an epistemology of analytical realism that provided a basis for Hobhouse’s claims about the reality of social mentality and social relations while avoiding any assumption that nothing more can be said about the ‘ultimate’ nature of this social reality. His sociology, he argued, had set out true representations of the social world, subject always to revision but empirically founded as objective reports.

This work, however, had very little intellectual impact and Hobhouse’s ideas on social theory had little circulation beyond the small circle of British sociologists. He showed little interest in international debate, although he had sufficient international recognition to be made an honorary life member of the American Sociological Society. His principal follower, Morris Ginsberg, did not even debate with his fellow British sociologists but preferred simply to expound the ideas of Hobhouse. As a result, the social theory achieved its lasting significance only as the taken-for-granted framework for the empirical work undertaken in Britain during the inter-war years and into the 1950s. By the time that British sociologists began to take a greater interest in theoretical issues, Hobhouse’s contribution was virtually forgotten and the works of French, German and US sociologists seemed more attractive. My aim in this article has been to uncover that social theory and to show its continuing importance. While the claim should not be overstated, it is clearly the case that Hobhouse has much to offer to contemporary debates within sociology and that his special sociology of social development may also warrant re-examination.